DigitalOcean Droplets vs. Firecracker

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
DigitalOcean Droplets
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
DigitalOcean's Droplets is designed to help the user spin up a virtual machine in just 55 seconds. Standard, General Purpose, CPU-Optimized, or Memory-Optimized configurations provide flexibility to build, test, and grow an app from startup to scale.
$4
per month
Firecracker
Score 4.0 out of 10
N/A
Firecracker is an open source virtualization technology that is purpose-built for creating and managing secure, multi-tenant container and function-based services. Firecracker enables users to deploy workloads in lightweight virtual machines, called microVMs that may provide security and workload isolation over traditional VMs, while enabling the speed and resource efficiency of containers. Firecracker was developed at Amazon Web Services with the goal of improving services like AWS Lambda…N/A
Pricing
DigitalOcean DropletsFirecracker
Editions & Modules
Basic
$4
per month
CPU-Optimized
$42
per month
General Purpose
$63
per month
Memory-Optimized
$84
per month
Storage-Optimized
$131
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DigitalOcean DropletsFirecracker
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsPricing for DigitalOcean Droplets varies depending on the size of the virtual environment and the associated data needs.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
DigitalOcean DropletsFirecracker
Considered Both Products
DigitalOcean Droplets
Chose DigitalOcean Droplets
Vultr had better performance in some instances but overall the dashboard was a mess to use a lot of times. When you zoom out from server performance and price, DigitalOcean offered more useful features, and the API was more consistent in some of the use cases we needed.
Chose DigitalOcean Droplets
Cost is much lesser
Interface is very easy to use
Documentation is readily available for most of the usecases.
Chose DigitalOcean Droplets
The reason for selecting digital ocean was since we require a cloud solution for testing applications internally without being bothered about servers needing to be deployed in different geographical locations. As Droplets can be deployed very easily and boot faster than any …
Chose DigitalOcean Droplets
DigitalOcean Droplets has more advanced options and the devs at our team are extremely geeky and they prefer to have full control on the server via SSH rather than cPanel.
Chose DigitalOcean Droplets
DigitalOcean Droplets is continuously evolving to be more and more powerful. It has great features and has low cost options, which is really great for developers. Its CDN, Loadbalancer, etc. make it a good place to host a high-traffic application. Moroever, DigitalOcean …
Chose DigitalOcean Droplets
Both Linode and DigitalOcean Droplets perform about the same and cost about the same. However we prefer the DigitalOcean Droplets interface, and the Cloud Firewall service is a must for us.
Firecracker

No answer on this topic

Features
DigitalOcean DropletsFirecracker
Server Virtualization
Comparison of Server Virtualization features of Product A and Product B
DigitalOcean Droplets
-
Ratings
Firecracker
6.4
Ratings
24% below category average
Virtual machine automated provisioning00 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Management console00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Live virtual machine backup00 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Live virtual machine migration00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Hypervisor-level security00 Ratings5.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
DigitalOcean DropletsFirecracker
Small Businesses
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Score 8.9 out of 10
DigitalOcean Droplets
DigitalOcean Droplets
Score 8.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.5 out of 10
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.5 out of 10
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
DigitalOcean DropletsFirecracker
Likelihood to Recommend
9.9
(0 ratings)
4.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
DigitalOcean DropletsFirecracker
Likelihood to Recommend
There are some other platforms that compete with DigitalOcean Droplets that have more performant servers for a very minimal price decrease. However, DigitalOcean's servers still have great performance, and the experience is better when you consider the developer console, managed options, and uptime that DigitalOcean offers. DigitalOcean is the better all-around package.
Read full review
While deploying workloads in lightweight microVMs presents a couple of perks, Firecracker may not be the best software to handle this. Startup times are slow and scalability is quite limited because of the jailer and virtualization barriers. We have had security breaches on isolated EC2 instances while using Firecracker. It however has a silver lining by improving how serverless functions in container ecosystems are run with their VMMs.
Read full review
Pros
  • Simplicity to scale services--the interface is very quick and effective to use
  • Reliability--this is key for us, as any downtime effects our reputation
  • Keeps the costs down--hosting our own equivalent infrastructure would cost a lot more
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  • It makes it easy to secure virtual machines as they are segmented into microvms with a minimal attack surface area
Read full review
Cons
  • In terms of an availability zone, they have limitations not available in most of the geographical locations.
  • No live support is available which can cause problem if you have outage.
  • Number of service is quite limited.
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  • Excludes devices unnecessarily
  • Has a slow startup time the basis being to improve security which is quite irrelevant.
  • It has limited functionalities on monitoring VMs despite being an open source.
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Usability
Other platforms dashboard console is more difficult to use. DigitalOcean's dashboard is clean, simple, and straightforward
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
DigitalOcean Droplets has more advanced options and the devs at our team are extremely geeky and they prefer to have full control on the server via SSH rather than cPanel.
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
  • Digital Ocean has been great helping us move web apps to the cloud
  • Digital Ocean has been really helpful when hiring contractors
  • The interface could use some work, but overall its not terrible
Read full review
  • Low memory overhead on each microVM
  • We can run workloads from different customers on the same machine.
Read full review
ScreenShots